


blood, sweat, and a temple we can call home

by shiningjedi



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Shatterpoint - Matthew Stover
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Parent-Child Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-31 15:05:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10901823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiningjedi/pseuds/shiningjedi
Summary: Shining lights aren't always surrounded by haloes and flower petals, and sometimes they can be found right after killing a room full of pirates.Or: how Mace Windu meets a girl who will one day be his daughter.Canon compliant.





	blood, sweat, and a temple we can call home

He felt a little dizzy, and there was blood clouding the edges of his vision, though he hadn’t thought that he’d been wounded; he wiped a grimy sleeve across his eyes, but it didn’t go away. It must not be physical blood, he realised, and disengaged his saber and clipped it to his belt – it was difficult from the degree his hands were shaking.

 

The pirates – was there a single one on the ship that had been left alive?

 

_(That he hadn’t slaughtered like they were nothing but vicious, slavering animals?)_

 

He had to focus, had to remember his training, had to ignore the flames of terror licking at his senses…

 

_(He’d never thought that being a Guardian would mean taking lives, and so many just on his first mission …)_

 

There was a something nudging insistently at the edge of his mind; he closed his eyes and let it take form, only to honest-to-force _stagger_ at the scale and intensity of the shatterpoint that rushed up at him. It didn’t feel like – like how it felt when there was a traitor in the room, or when something big was about to give for worse or better.

 

It felt like – it reminded him of the day that Master Yoda had asked him to be his Padawan. Something warm, somehow, something that felt like home, _like family_ …

 

He was walking towards the source of it now, corpses of blaster-scarred civilians and slashed-through pirates alike littering the plating of the carpeted durasteel deck but no longer holding his conscience captive. This was something greater than that, something in the here and now…

 

A child was crying.

 

He broke into a run despite himself, stumbling and tripping over his feet from the slowly clearing remains of a blanketing rage and bitter-tasting adrenaline, and threw a door open with the Force to find the bloodied bodies of two young humans, a man and a woman, with an infant girl –

 

_(a beacon of light, presence stretching out to him and regarding him with what was almost famililarity, shining, shining, shining –)_

 

an infant girl with light brown skin and tufts of soft black hair wailing and clinging to her mother’s tunic in a desperate plea, sobbing “Lapa” over and over again and barely noticing his arrival.

 

Mace sank to his knees beside her.

 

The force was empty, all through the ship – there was only him, and her, and reverberating echoes of the screams of dying men and woman and other people with homes, and lives, and families, and it was _too much_ , too much to bear for the both of them, sensing their own pain, each other’s, the pain of the deceased –

 

 

“I’m sorry, little one.”

 

It came out in a rasp for breath, tears streaking down his face and washing away the grime and blood, despite his most emphatic attempts to stop them.

 

“I can’t – I can’t take you back to your home, but, if you will let me, I can bring you to a new one.”

**Author's Note:**

> im love them.
> 
> (Depa Billaba's birth parents were canonically killed by pirates, and she was rescued by Mace. I merely took it upon myself to expand the scene.)


End file.
